First, you need to know something:
Once upon a time, Burger King was in France. They installed their first restaurant in 1981 on the Champs-Elysées. After 16 years they decided to sell their 39 restaurants and left the country under the pressure of their 2 competitors (yes, only 2), McDonalds and Quick (and because you’re super interested here’s the website to know about this foreign and exciting fast-food chain that is Quick: http://www.quick.fr) They failed to expand as well as the competition, and decided they were too small to continue to operate.
That said, it’s time for the second part, watch this campaign from 2010:
Ok it’s in French, but it’s quite easy to understand though. Everybody speaks the burger language! The ad features a Whopper preparation with a cheesy song in the background saying how awesome Burger King and the Whopper is.
What did you say? Weird to advertise for a brand not even existing in France? True.
But if you give good attention, you see that the main purpose of the ad is to sell the Eurostar trip between Paris and London, the train that goes under the sea!
The creative agency didn’t need to make thorough researches on that.
Any French people (well at least 15-25 years old) first move arriving in London is to run to the nearest Burger King, sometimes even the one in the train station.
Why?
1 - Burger King is good (well now that I am in the US, I had to review my position as CLEARLY there is some FAR MORE tastiest burgers and fries)
2 - and most importantly, it doesn’t exist in France!
People want what they can’t have or don’t have, the wheel of desire (reminds me of my philosophy class in high school!).
USA is the country of availability; everything you want, need, or need to want is available, all the time, everywhere.
In consequence something hard to get (iPad2 on the launch date, Chick-Fil-A on a Sunday…) is even most wanted and customers are willing to do/pay a lot more to acquire something inaccessible.
Here’s the start of a recent thought, and also my first French Culture 101 class.
Hope you enjoyed it,
Barthelemy Bricout
Hmm, so you're saying there is an arbitrage opportunity with BK in France?? I think this is a really good article showing how advertisers examine their marketing spending.
ReplyDeleteIt is interesting to note that BK has commercials in France when they don't have a physical presence. They must feel it is important to drive international interest in BK rather than have storefronts on the ground.
Given the note from Barth that BK is at the end of the train stop, I wonder if EuroStar is cutting BK some breaks to maybe plug that London and the King are train stop away...
--Andrew Akers
Your blog reminded me of a marketing class I had 2 years ago in which we were discussing a marketing strategy of Red Bull. They would advertise heavily in a certain region by for example promoting on university campuses and encourage students to throw parties at which Red Bull would be promoted. After heavily advertising there they would limit the distribution in that area to increase the attractiveness of the product. Not giving people what they want is definitely a powerful tool…
ReplyDelete